It is subtle in that you don’t see the payoff until long after the damage is done. The more traditional forms of bribery tend to be a) illegal, and b) not infrequently caught while the person is still in office. What Holder and Dodd did is very dodgy, but hard to prove illegal.
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Well, you’re probably able to legislate such things up there…
My argument against it is twofold. First off, I lived in SF for a long time, which is a very weird place politically. It’s basically a one party town, but the result has been that you actually have a large number of “parties” and independents running in elections, and so the end result is more like that of other countries. Well, did. All the progressives in SF are termed out, and everyone who ever voted for them has been run out of town, so from here out it’ll probably just be a corporatism technocracy.
When I got there, the Board of Supervisors was a lot like proportional representation. There were 11 seats and the race was city-wide, so you basically chose 11 people from a long list. That mean you couldn’t possibly know who you were voting for, and you couldn’t possibly get any recognition are media unless you could mount a citywide campaign, which apart from a few people meant being in with the party machine. This meant that people had no investment in the board, including the board members themselves, over half of which would resign before the end of their two year terms.
When the city went to ward-based representation everything changed: suddenly insurgents with little money could effectively make themselves known in the smaller arena of a neighborhood, and voters had serious buy-in. The composition and politics of the city changed 180°. So I’ll always support local representation.
I think your problems stems from another issue which SF faced, and which the UK faces, perhaps to a more damaging degree, which is that the vote is split many ways in almost every race, with a large number of districts represented by someone who could only cobble together 35% or so of the vote. This seriously distorts politics, creating all sorts of weird-ass gamesmanship and also leaving the majority of citizens feeling like they have no say in government. That’s why I would recommend instead a >50% requirement for election, and an instant-runoff voting system.
And I’m 100% behind cutting out the regulated business/lobbyist – Congress/federal appointment revolving door. Now I’m going to fantasize about making it a retroactively capital offense…
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Yeah, I’m totally against the death penalty, but I definitely feel a bit of wiggle room when it comes to fucking corruption.
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It runs a little deeper than that. In Québec when I lived there, we had effectively a two-party system, PLQ and PQ. I recall at least a couple of PQ majority governments where the Liberals (PLQ) got the plurality of the popular vote (it went something like 49% PLQ, 48% PQ, fringe candidates the rest). The split in vote was between the very Francophone, very nationalist hinterlands, and the large, very cosmopolitan city (Montréal) which has roughly half of Québec’s population. Montréal by itself cannot elect a government; it can’t even come close.
The riding boundaries in Québec aren’t particularly illogical or gerrymandered - they tend to follow city and county boundaries - but capturing a logical community in a city means taking in a relatively small area with 20- to 50,000 people, while a logical rural riding might have a much larger area, (in Québec, maybe even thousands of square kilometers in regions like Nunavik) but only 10,000 inhabitants. The rural areas get a lot of representation for their population.
I’d imagine you have a similar problem (over and above gerrymandering) in your Congressional districts. (Actually, your Senate enshrines an extreme form of regional representation.)
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Not saying it will give you the results you want! But I think it is more fair than first past the post or proportional representation.
There’s a significant issue with Gerrymandering in a number of states, e.g. Texas, but Congressional Districts are based very strongly on population, not
geographic region, and district borders (as well as the number of seats apportioned to a State) are potentially redrawn with every census. The Senate enshrines the notion of the States as equal partners in the Union, which naturally provides a greater say in Government to farm/rural States than would be granted by population.
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Hmmm. Is Nature in violation of Canadian Law?
Canadian election brings hope for science
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative party is ousted by the Liberals.
http://www.nature.com/news/canadian-election-brings-hope-for-science-1.18607
The Liberals have promised to amend some of the damage done to science and evidence-based policymaking in Canada under the Conservative government, which came into power in 2006.
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If a Calgary based friend of mine is to be believed, that would actually be a pretty solid vote winning plan in the rest of Alberta.
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The law is from the 1920s and actually doesn’t cover expressions of opinions (such as what John Oliver expressed). So he’s fine. It is meant to cover things like a foreign interest coming into Canada and actively spending money to swing the vote for their own criminal reasons. It hasn’t been used in years.
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The US could use something like that for Rupert fucking Murdoch.
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Ah. Thanks. I wasn’t clear on that. We are somewhat less proportional in our ridings for a variety of reasons, but reapportionment has been taken right out of partisan hands. http://www.jjmccullough.com/index.php/2011/03/01/redistricting-something-canada-does-better/
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Australia could use something like that for fucking Murdoch.
Even just taking his Twitter account away from him would be enough.
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I don’t think proportional representation is the problem really (although I used to think it sounded more representative of the electorate as a whole). I see very little difference between a two or three party system with two parties representing a broad base of opinion and one out at left field, and many parties representing a narrower set of opinions each.
At Westminster at least what matters more is voting in the House and the power of the whips over backbenchers. All votes should be free unless the Whip’s office can justify otherwise.
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What the actual fuck? How in the hell did he convince ANYONE that getting rid of the census was a good idea?!?
He didn’t. He sent one of his ministers to make nonsensical statements about it, basically ending that minister’s political career. It was something that the government could do without legislation, so they just did it. It will be undone by the new government, and basically Canada will just have a black hole in our census data. In 2050 when someone is doing research and says, “Why is there no census data for 2011” someone else will answer, “Canada elected a government that was psychotically anti-research at that time.” I imagine this will be followed by, “Really?” “Really.” “No, really?” and so on.
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I always thought it was rather evil-overlord brilliant of them. They didn’t want facts muddying up their cutting of funding to various social safety networks, so lets cut the data gathering that shows those areas have demonstrated need and voila! No one cares if you cut the funding because there is no data showing need! I mean… it’s brilliant, evil, but brilliant, in the movie-evil-overlord kind of way.
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It’s rare when an American can hear about the actions of another government and think, “Wow, I’m so glad that hasn’t happened here yet.” Of course, that American is also likely to think, only seconds after the above thought, “But give it time.”
And let me say again how utterly stupid and evil that is.
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Harper is a straight up neocon Republican, but worse yet, he was a neocon Republican in a country with a single legislature, where elected officials always vote the way their party leader tells them, and with a population that was so busy laughing at American Republicans that they didn’t notice they’d elected their own. Getting rid of the census wasn’t even near the top of the list of bad things he did. How about retroactively re-writing criminal laws so that his cronies who did things on his behalf couldn’t be prosecuted? Or changing election law so that people investigating election fraud answer to partisans instead of an independent body?
Though to be honest I’m afraid to ask how that last one works in the US. No independent elections body = no democracy.
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By claiming that thousands and thousands of complaints had come in from patriotic Canadians upset over the punitive measures enforcing the mandatory long-form* census.
Later it was revealed those complaints numbered in single digits and were probably prompted. No apology was made, no admissions, barely an acknowledgement.
But StatsCan was already compromised so it hardly mattered. The long-form was probably one of the most effective tools ever for empirically grading the historical performance of a government, so it was a natural target of the CPC.
That was the work of the infamous Tony Clement pictured here (with Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey and BoingBoing Friend Chris Albinson) who is one of the most cunning of the CPC team and considered a candidate party leader.
*the census like most is mandatory for everyone, but now just the short form which is little more than a headcount compared to the long form, which no one is now compelled to complete
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Is he? He’s barely shown his face in public since that Census debacle. I thought maybe he was too embarrassed to do something like run for leader now. (Maybe just my hopes projected onto reality?)
